


And Found Me Here

by astralis



Category: The Secret Country Series - Pamela Dean
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-22
Updated: 2013-09-22
Packaged: 2017-12-27 07:34:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/976148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astralis/pseuds/astralis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Between the mysterious ceremonies of the Green Caves, a voice in her head quoting Shakespeare at her, and four relatives with minds of their own, Ruth had a lot to think about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Found Me Here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ryfkah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryfkah/gifts).



> I share your sentiments on Ruth's story, so I was thrilled to get your request. I hope this works for you.
> 
> All the quotes used are attributed at the end.

  
_And I awoke and found me here,_  
 _On the cold hill's side._  
John Keats, 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'  


*

The good thing about spending what little free time you had in the apprentices' library was that you looked like you were studying really hard, trying to make up for your demotion. (Ruth was, in fact, studying really hard in the hope that she might actually learn something useful, but no one needed to know that.)

The bad thing was that everyone knew where you were and thought nothing of poking you in the arm to make you pay attention.

“Ruth. _Ruth_.”

In the game, when you forgot your lines or weren't sure what ought to come next, you could count on some pretty heavy hint-dropping from your relations. _You're late for the Ceremony of Roots and Trees, Lady Ruth!_ In the Secret Country, however, all that got you was someone hissing your name at you while you tried to figure out what it was you'd missed and whatever it was you were supposed to do next, all without looking as though you were clueless.

“Come _on_ ,” Anne muttered, impatiently. “Meredith's coming.”

Ruth pushed the book she was reading aside and looked up, a sudden panic flooding over her. The library had emptied itself of people without her noticing; Anne was standing in the doorway, twisting her hands together the way she did when she got nervous. 

With Meredith's words to her on the occasion of her demotion still chasing each other round and round in her head, Ruth decided that, clueless or not, it would be appropriate to do whatever Anne was doing and hope she could fumble her way through it. Anne was a year older than Lady Ruth; they had been apprentices and then journeymen together, but now she held a higher rank thanks to the affair of the Nightmare Grass. With her other self's white dress twisting itself around her ankles, Ruth followed along behind Anne and tried to walk like Patrick on his way to a science class. They passed into the damp, cavernous room that was the pride and joy of the Green Caves: the underground garden. The dozen or more sorcerers in the room were forming themselves into a lopsided circle which took into account the unhelpful manner in which the plants had been arranged. 

Ruth had no sooner stepped into the circle than Meredith strode into the room, all long hair and long skirts. Everything and everyone in the room was so silent Ruth thought, wildly and frantically, that she was breathing too loudly, and tried to hold her breath.

“Douse the candles,” Meredith said, without any greeting or any hint at what might be to come. Ruth glanced sideways at Anne, bit her lip, and waited.

Luke, the only apprentice ranked lower than Ruth – and that only because he had been of the Green Caves a mere three months – left the circle and scurried round the room, hastily blowing out one candle after another. As the dark grew and seemed to swallow the faces of the people around her, Ruth's heartbeat became painfully fast.

She had no idea what she ought to do, and in moments it would be obvious. She would be revealed as an impostor and publicly denounced, her imagination running wild on the possible consequences. There was no doubt Meredith had dozens of nasty tricks up her sleeve, not just for Ruth but for her siblings and cousins as well, if she believed that they were in league with the impostor Ruth.

 _Begin at the beginning_. A voice somehow both familiar and unearthly spoke into the silence, sounding almost amused. _And go on till you come to the end: then stop._ Ruth stared round the room in the darkness, wondering who had spoken. 

But no one had. She had thought it, or someone whose voice was almost her own had whispered it inside her head.

 _Alice in Wonderland_ , she thought, blinking several times as though that would clear the confusion. She hadn't read that book in years, because to read it was to invite Patrick's scorn, so where had that come from? It was reasonable advice, at least, as long as you knew what was the beginning and what was the end, and what ought to lie between the two. She felt extremely cold.

Another voice rang out into the darkness. Hearing it through layers of fear, Ruth hardly knew it for human at first: perhaps anything was possible here. “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art, not in lone splendour hung aloft the night.” A harsh white ball of light flared into existence overhead, the very definition of lone splendour. Ruth hoped that Ellen was responsible for the spell. It seemed like her doing.

In the thin, weird, ghostly light cast by the sphere, even the kindest sorcerer had a terrible look about them. It was disconcerting, and yet in some way it was exactly what Ruth had long imagined. If Ellen had created the spell, had Ruth done this? Was this Prospero and Ariel, Tolkien's elves and a lifetime of fairy tales rolled into one, twisted and enhanced?

Out of the silence the sorcerers began chanting, singing, sentences and phrases trailing around each other like the green beans Ellen had tried to grow one year. As soon as Ruth seemed to grasp the meaning of sentences things would change direction, the next words being about something else entirely. This definitely had to be some kind of a ceremony, rather than some sort of communal spell-casting, and had she not been so afraid of the moment of discovery she might have been interested. As it was, she wished desperately to have Patrick beside her, muttering about hallucinations and the trouble with imagination.

Ruth wiped her damp palms against her skirt, and thought she might be sick. Something was making itself known at the edge of her thoughts, something like the feeling of having gone somewhere to do something and, on arrival, realising you had no idea what it was you'd gone there to do.

From beside Ruth Anne spoke against a backdrop of other voices, “That undivided we from year to year might work in our high calling.”

Ruth's stomach twisted and lurched. She swallowed hard and then, somehow, heard herself speak, chanting without meaning to. “A bright hope to which our fancies, mingling, gave free scope till checked by some necessities severe.” It had the flavour of a poem, though not one that she had ever heard, and yet it had come from somewhere in the back of her mind as though it was something she had memorised once and then forgotten. She had spoken in the voice she had used for Lady Ruth in the game; she hadn't done that on purpose either.

Ruth had to clench her fists to stop her hands from shaking. She ought to be relieved, but she was not. There was nothing at all reassuring about knowing things you ought to have no way of knowing, helpful as those things might prove to be. 

And she understood no more of the ceremony than she had before, which was infuriating.

 _Explain this_ , she thought, thinking of Patrick. If that strange, echoing voice was really there, and if it wanted to be any help at all, it could start by answering a few questions.

There was a pause, as the chanting continued around her, and Ruth waited, half-afraid she was beginning to lose her mind until the voice spoke again. _There are more things in Heaven -_

No help at all. _Shut up_.

*

With the ceremony over – and her imposition undetected – Ruth slipped away from the crowd of apprentices and journeymen before Anne could talk or Meredith could require something of her, and made her way back into the main part of High Castle. She had had no clear purpose in mind other than escaping the Green Caves, and only when she was halfway there did she realise she was heading for Patrick and Ted's room. She stopped short in the corridor. There would be few things worse for her reputation than being caught anywhere near Ted's room.

She ought, Ruth decided, in a cross voice somehow reminiscent of Patrick, to _think_ before she did things rather than rushing into them as if she were Ellen. She sat down as though she were Laura and was promptly fallen over by a maidservant, which was also like Laura.

Ruth's head hurt, and was not improved by the sight of the maidservant picking herself up, rubbing an elbow and biting back giggles. She wondered if the real Lady Ruth had ever been this embarrassed, and decided that she probably had not. 

“Do you watch where you're going,” she said, in a voice so unlike her own that for a moment she was as startled to hear it as she had been to hear herself speak during the ceremony. Without thought, she straightened her back, holding her head high and gaze steady, as she had done playing Lady Ruth, except Lady Ruth had not been caught sitting on the floor.

The maidservant stepped back, her face losing all trace of a smile. “Milady Ruth – I beg your pardon,” she said hastily, and turned, and fled.

_Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in women._

“It is _not_ ,” Ruth declared aloud, “and you can't talk, anyway.”

She shook her head. There was too much happening in it, and this feeling of being two people at the same time was becoming more and more uncomfortable. If that voice was anyone in particular, and not some manifestation of the Secret Country or of Ruth Carroll's taste in literature, it had to be the Lady Ruth. And if the real Lady Ruth was in there somewhere, why couldn't she do something more helpful than quoting Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll? And why was she in Ruth's head, as opposed to all the other places she could possibly be? Was this some kind of sorcery, or did they all have echoes of their other selves in their heads? And if so, how on earth was Patrick managing to cope with this?

Ruth got up off the floor, and turned resolutely away from her original destination. She had a favourite balcony overlooking the lake that her relatives hadn't discovered yet, and that no one else seemed to care for. She made her way there with as much appearance of dignity as she could muster, encountering no one she knew on the way, and finally stepped outside. It was late afternoon, and low dark clouds hung over the sky. It was not raining yet, although it probably would before night.

Ruth leaned against the wall of pink stone that surrounded the balcony, and looked out at the Secret Country. Up here she could imagine herself to be a thousand miles from the oppressive dampness of the Green Caves and the clatter and clamour of High Castle. There was no Meredith to yell, no arcane rituals she didn't understand, no Anne to ask questions she couldn't answer. There was no Patrick to reason with, no Ellen to be placated, no Laura to be picked up and soothed, no Ted to aid in her quest for answers. There was just Ruth, whatever that might mean.

That day's ceremony - the first since they'd arrived - had been the most unsettling thing she'd experienced yet in the Secret Country, beating the Nightmare Grass and the colour of High Castle's walls. One minute she had been Ruth Carroll, too far out, not waving but drowning; and then something had happened and for a moment she had almost been someone else. Voices in her head, things that she suddenly knew yet had no way of knowing - those things could only be from Lady Ruth, who was not here and was nowhere that Ruth could find her. 

Suddenly, intently, Ruth wanted to go home. Not to Australia - that was not quite home, although it was better than nothing - but the Pennsylvania farm where they had grown up playing at the Secret Country, with the ramshackle old barn that had stood in for High Castle and the sprawling oak tree up which Ruth had hidden on a multitude of occasions, communing with nature as befitted one of the Green Caves. There all that mattered was that Laura not do herself a serious injury and that their parents never find out the elaborate extent of the game (Patrick feared ridicule, which, considering their parents, Ruth had always thought was unlikely, but then a secret was a secret).

She wanted the tiny attic room she had claimed because it was preferable to sharing a room with Ellen, with the bookshelves her father had made spreading across one wall and the blue gingham curtains courtesy of her aunt. She wanted the wooden floors and the ancient rag rug and her flute, and most of all she wanted a life where the only unpredictable thing was Ellen.

 _Nothing will come of nothing,_ said the voice. _Speak again._

“I will not,” said Ruth, a dozen possible retorts springing to mind. The trouble with the Secret Country – well, one of the troubles – was that anything you had read and happened to remember could be sorcerous. Meredith said that for sorcery there must also be intent – the extent of which seemed to vary depending on the strength of the spell - and the existence of some magical skill, which Ruth had found only mildly reassuring. She was not likely to develop much intent for anything dangerous. Laura and Ellen, on the other hand, were capable of intending all sorts of things, most of them fanciful, and they had grown up hearing Shakespeare recited around them. All they were missing was magical ability, and Ruth would not put it past either of them to develop it. 

The voice didn't respond. Ruth sighed after a moment, for dramatic effect if nothing else, then refocused her mind. “Who are you?” she asked. “And don't you _dare_ say Silvia.”

_To her let us garlands bring?_

“Please,” said Ruth, ridiculously. If anyone else in High Castle was going to develop the urge to walk out onto this particular balcony, it would likely be now, just in time to see her talking to herself.

_Do you guess._

It was the first thing Ruth had heard the voice say that wasn't – as far as she knew – a quote. She fixed her gaze on a point on the horizon lest she lose her courage, and spoke. “I think you're Lady Ruth of the Green Caves, formerly Princess of the Hidden Land and Lord of the King's Forests.”

 _Nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea-change._ The voice was curiously flat.

“Into something rich and strange,” Ruth said. She swallowed hard. “I don't understand any of this.” She thought of Fence, who ought to be returning soon; the Banquet of Midsummer's Eve was near at hand. Maybe they really should try to explain all this to him.

There was silence inside her head. When it seemed obvious that the voice was not planning to speak again, Ruth propped her elbows on the wall (where they were likely to become scratched and sore in a matter of minutes) and put her chin on her hands. It did not make her any more comfortable to know that the voice was – or was claiming to be – the real Lady Ruth.

Not that anything about this situation had been at all comfortable to start with.

She stayed on the balcony in silence, alone in her head, as the sun began to go down and the chill in the air became increasingly intolerable. Far below her the ducks were coming ashore, settling themselves in the long grass at the water's edge. Ruth watched them until the lake was empty of ducks, the waters still and dark.

As far as she knew, no one had imagined ducks into the Secret Country. There had been great discussions about the number of swans on the moat, and where the swans had come from, and what they ate, and whether it was permissable to put enchantments on the swans, but no ducks. They were refreshingly normal in a world where nothing made much sense.

 _How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks._

Startled, Ruth stood up straight. That was neither Shakespeare nor poetry, but the result of her great summer of detective novels, and what was it doing in the Secret Country? Was it some piece of philosophy, dispensed by wizards or kings? Some spell that, intent or not, might do a dozen unpredictable things, either to ducks or to humans?

But then that voice had not had the accent with which Lady Ruth apparently spoke.

Ruth breathed out. She was, apparently, still in her own head, no matter what else might be in it, and it was possible that not all the literature she loved was sorcerous. “Harriet Vane sat at her writing-table and stared out into Mecklenburg Square,” she said aloud, cautiously. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the something of something else.” Her memory failing her, she scowled. She was not sure what it was that she had proved, other than that she could - mostly, anyway - remember things which ought not to have anything to do with the Secret Country, and that they did not appear to be magic. 

She wondered if this was what it felt like to be Laura. Laura seemed to go through life just waiting to break something else, and greeting each new incident with resignation, a sentiment Ruth had never quite understood before.

Goosebumps prickled along her arms. There was a particular biting quality to the wind in the Secret Country that seemed to go straight to one's bones, and the headache which had begun in the hallway had become a rhythmic pounding behind her right temple. Maybe Agatha would give her something for it, if she could muster up the energy to be Lady Ruth again.

She ought to go in now, anyway. Her relatives were all probably looking for her, and Laura was likely to decide that Meredith had turned Ruth into a frog if she was nowhere to be found. Besides, the quiet out here was becoming too quiet, and Patrick and Ellen, Ted and Laura, were the only piece of home she had.

And so Ruth Eleanora Carroll, Lady Ruth, Sorcerer of the Green Caves and lover of books, took one last look out at the Secret Country and went inside to find her family.

**Author's Note:**

> "Begin at the beginning... And go on till you come to the end: then stop." Lewis Carroll, _Alice in Wonderland_ , chapter XII.
> 
> “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art/not in lone splendour hung aloft the night.” John Keats, 'Bright Star! Would I were steadfast as thou art'.
> 
> “That undivided we from year to year/Might work in our high Calling - a bright hope/To which our fancies, mingling, gave free scope/Till checked by some necessities severe.” William Wordsworth, 'At Applewaite, Near Keswick 1804'.
> 
> "There are more things in Heaven..." William Shakespeare, _Hamlet_ , Act I, Scene V.
> 
> "Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in women." Shakespeare, _King Lear_ , Act V, Scene III.
> 
> "I was much too far out all my life/And not waving but drowning." Stevie Smith, "Not Waving but Drowning".
> 
> "Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again." Shakespeare, _King Lear_ , Act I, Scene I.
> 
> "Who is Silvia? ... To her let us garlands bring." Shakespeare, _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ , Act IV, Scene II.
> 
> "But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange." Shakespeare, _The Tempest_ , Act I, Scene II.
> 
> "How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks." Dorothy L. Sayers, _Gaudy Night_ , chapter XV.
> 
> “Harriet Vane sat at her writing-table and stared out into Mecklenburg Square." Sayers, _Gaudy Night_ , chapter I.
> 
> “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..." Charles Dickens, _A Tale of Two Cities_ , chapter I.


End file.
